Donna Cole Schultz died on March 31, 2004. She was one of the very earliest Gardnerian Wiccans in the U.S and founded a Gardnerian coven in the 60's. She was initiated and ordained by a high priestess and high priest who were themselves initiated and ordained by Gerald Gardner. Nonetheless, she dispensed with many original Gardnerian customs as inappropriate for Americans, including scourging and sexual acts and nudity in rituals. With Herman Enderle she helped to organize the Pagan Way movement in the 60's and 70's. They wrote THE BOOK OF PAGAN RITUALS, a Pagan Way Dedicant and First Degree notebook, published without their permission by Weiser. Her best known student was Amber K, very early in Amber's career. In fact, Donna's lineage probably comprised MOST Wiccans and Neo-Pagans in the Chicago Metro area well into the '80's.
In 1970, Donna and Herman Enderle were teaching together at Temple of the Pagan Way. Donna was an earthy, intelligent, and powerful woman, sought after by physicians -- especially neurologists -- for healing their more difficult patients.
Donna was a founding member of the Midwest Pagan Council, which held some of the earliest regional festivals in the '70's. She also was a founder of the Chicago area COG council c. 1980.
Professionally, Donna was a professor of clinical social work at the Jane Addams School of Social Work at the University of Illinois.
(thank you to Christa Heiden Landon, http://paganinstitute.org/PIR/Pagan_community_news.html#Lady%20Donna%20Cole%20Schultz%20completes%20a%20lifetime%20of%20service%20to%20the%20Gods)
Donna Cole Schultz
Type of Passage: Death
Date of Passage: March 31st. 2004
Author: Judy Harrow
Posted: April 2nd. 2004
Times Viewed: 6,593
Donna Cole Schultz passed on March 31, 2004. Although she was not my Craft ancestor in terms of formal lineage, she was an elder, a role model, and a dear friend of many years.
Back in the mid-seventies, when I was trained, we had some training materials that were known as the "purple papers," because they were reproduced by a method that involved purple ink. I think it was called hexograph or rexograph or some such. Anyhow, many of these outer court practice materials were attributed to "Donna Cole's book." So I figured that she was a first-generation priestess, active while I was still a teen without a clue.
When I met Donna a few years later, and discovered that she was not that much older than me, I was so amazed that I blurted out some stupid comment. From that moment, the phrase "the venerable Donna" became a standing joke between us, and we became friends. We had a lot to connect us: like me, she was ethnically Jewish, politically leftist, and religiously unorthodox.
Donna's introduction to magic came from a group of self-trained, book-trained teenagers, students of her first husband, who was a high school teacher. The mother of one of the kids was critically ill. Donna was with the youngsters when they did a healing rite they had designed themselves, based entirely on their reading. It worked. She later lived for a while in Britain, where she received formal Gardnerian training and initiation, but she never forgot that nobody has a patent on magic or a copywrite on the Goddess's love and healing. Her own practice combined classical GardCraft with Vodun. You should have seen the collection of drums in one corner of her temple room.
Recently, as part of her fight against cancer, she was visiting an oncologist here in New York every six months. Also, by then I was retired, so I could go out and play with her for an afternoon. This gave us a chance to get together more often than we used to. The last time I saw Donna was last spring. She was staying at a hotel in the East 30s, just two or three blocks from the Worker's Circle building, which has a wonderful Yiddish bookstore on the ground floor. I took her there.
You may not know of the Worker's Circle, which is much diminished from what it was before the Holocaust: a Yiddishist, secular, labor organization that ran a network of folk schools, places for Jewish children to learn about their culture without the overlay of religious orthodoxy. Donna's philosophical roots and mine go back to this movement. She loved their bookstore, and returned the next day without me. Her thank you note is the last I heard from her. I did not know that her illness had worsened.
Funny, feisty, freethinking Donna represented the very best of British Traditional Wicca. May we go forward always in that spirit!
thank you to Judy Harrow http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usnj&c=passages&id=8376)
